![]() ![]() But for me, as is peculiar to a generation of middle-class Anglophone Tamilians from Madras, the experience of watching was tinged with the mysterious sense of only partial understanding. My grandfather, of course, thought that the popular films my grandmother watched were “trash,” though he watched them anyway, and so did I. My grandfather was a Trekkie and my grandmother a pulp fiction fan, and I didn’t even know it. It was naturally this that stuck in the mind of the transfixed nine-year-old, and of course that Tamil villains often spoke English, had mysterious names like “Robert,” smoked large pipes, and haughtily commanded their underlings to fetch them large measures of Scotch. Rajini’s realization that what the villain had been referring to as his “black roses” were actually human eyeballs was rendered all the more unnerving because of their strangely captivating English moniker. What grabbed me by the throat was Rajini’s gruesome discovery of glass jars filled with eyeballs in the villain’s refrigerator the man who had killed his parents was also involved in the illicit trade of pilfered body parts. In the 1979 Rajinikanth film Dharma Yuddham, the primary moral lessons of a son’s filial revenge for the murder of his parents washed over me with little effect. One film in particular comes hurtling back from the otherwise hazy cloud of cinematic childhood memory. Tamil thrillers and horror films, on the other hand, were riveting, their uncanniness only compounded by the fact that I couldn’t fully understand their more intricate plotlines. Movies seemed to capture both the provincial grip of our city of three million as well as our equally provincial ambitions to leave it. What fascinated were the rapid and logic-defying dress and scene changes during songs, where a dhavani-wearing peasant girl could be delivered from the tedium of tending water buffalo by a seamless camera cut, instantaneously depositing her into the perfectly reasonable confines of a blood-red cocktail dress as she sashayed down a London street. But their proximity to family life (ours and, I thought, everyone else’s) meant that they offered nothing new - they revolved endlessly around love, marriage, and familial duty, inevitably ending in dramatic monologues, tears, and death, which never came quickly enough. Although my own Tamil was poor - English having long usurped its place as my primary language - I could easily grasp the gist of the dialogue of my grandmother’s preferred brand of family melodrama. Films therefore offered a peculiarly intimate window onto our lives. Unlike Bollywood’s avaricious national reach, the somewhat humbler linguistic ambitions of Tamil cinema dictated that it was usually about Tamilians, usually living in Tamil Nadu. He was a superhero whose principal superpower was style. SOUNDAR RAJINIKANTH CHILDREN MOVIERajini was the quintessential Tamil movie star - he was powered by righteous anger but avenged the innocent with panache. His magnetism derived in part from his mythic rise from Marathi bus conductor in Bangalore to one of Indian cinema’s most iconic stars, but mainly from the sting of his whiplike one-liners and the casual disdain with which he flicked away villains. Rajini was the big-haired, mustachioed hero who casually donned all-white pantsuits and was rarely detached from his trademark black shades. While my grandfather and I would eagerly wait for the show to end to watch the next diligently taped episode of Star Trek, my grandmother would remain transfixed by Rajini’s gyrating, hair-flicking charisma, oblivious to our impatience. I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor of my grandparents’ bedroom as a child, watching Rajinikanth on Oliyum Oliyum, the popular compilation show of Tamil film songs. But my grandmother’s enthusiasm for Tamil movies meant a childhood with a generous, if involuntary, dose of Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan, Prabhu, Mohan, Radha, Nadhiya, Ambika, and the many others who made up Tamil cinema’s chubby, hirsute, red-lipped pantheon in the 1980s and ’90s. ![]() BORN INTO SOUTH INDIA’S cinematic capital, Madras (now Chennai), I rarely watched Bollywood films. ![]()
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